Foxquilt: A Day In The Life of Chris Carleton

Day in the Life: Director, Platform Architecture

Meet Chris!?

Chris is a part of Foxquilt Canada and joined our Toronto office in October 2021 as a Sr. Software Engineer, and stepped up into his current role as Director, Platform Architecture a year later in October 2022. We sat down with Chris to get a glimpse into what a day in his life is like.?

So, Foxquilt Tech team - what do you get to do everyday as a Director of Platform Architecture??

We're a small company so we all wear lots of hats. My hats include "Platform/Technology Evangelist", "Mentor", "Software Architect", "Technical Business Analyst", and, occasionally, "Software Engineer." On any given day I might be meeting with prospective strategic partners with the executives, designing core components of? our system, working with our engineers on their professional development and helping them with their work, or sometimes just rolling up my sleeves and writing some code myself.

You could say I'm a pretty hands-on guy who likes to stay busy.

How do you manage to stay organized throughout it all???

I have yet to find that one perfect tool that solves all of my organizational challenges. I'm of the opinion that there is no such tool but I'm always open to someone changing my mind! As such, I use handful of different tools for different needs:

• Jira is our primary tool for tracking what is getting done. I spend a lot of time looking at that and defining work that needs to get done.
• Google Calendar lets me know where I need to be and when.
• Google Keep is my go-to tool for just keeping a running list of ToDos.
• Obsidian is my preferred note-taking app. I use it for everything from keeping meeting notes to tracking my one-on-ones with the engineers.

. . . .? I still long for a worthy tool to tame the monster that is my email inbox.

All tech teams have such a different cadence and makeup to them; what’s it like to be a part of Foxquilt’s??

We have a talented and resourceful team of software engineers here at Foxquilt. They are an absolute pleasure to work with! They work closely together every day and solve complicated problems regularly. They are an intrinsically motivated bunch and they take a ton of pride in their work.

The tech team is often tasked with reacting quickly to evolving business needs but there is always an attitude of "We've got this!" and a spirit of constantly innovating and improving on how we work.

Every job has its ups and down; what would you say is the hardest part of your work??

What do you get the person who never runs out of cool things to work on? Time to do them all! There's always a tight deadline on the horizon and a dozen awesome initiatives and projects to juggle. My biggest challenge at work is managing my most scarce resource: time! And, naturally, this includes the engineers' time because without them nothing would get done! That means advocating for the time to do things right and in a way that we will be proud of and have confidence in.

And then on the flipside, what's the best project you've gotten to work on?

Ooooh... this is a great question. As Director of platform architecture, I have my hands in most of our projects to some extent. I think my favorite so far was designing our new federated authentication microservice. It was a green-field project where we were able to adopt some new technologies and modern architecture practices and enable a more consistent user experience across our whole platform.

And, just recently, one of our newer engineers extended the service to support single sign-on from external partners which has allowed for a substantial uptake of new brokers from external companies to leverage our platform. A huge win for the whole company!

Why is your role important for a tech company to have?

I see my role as a full-time "enabler of awesome". Today's competitive business world demands expediency and a fast-to-market mentality and Foxquilt is subject to these same market forces as everyone else. This can't come at the expense of the quality of our platform though. Haphazardly, coding features at a break-neck pace inevitably leads to buggy code that becomes harder and harder to maintain and build upon over time.

As the Director of Platform Architecture, I ensure that the engineers have everything they need to work fast, own the quality of their work, and produce things with as few roadblocks as possible. This comes in the form of many things like providing sound and consistent architectural design for the platform, ensuring the right tools are in place to get the job done quickly and easily, putting a strong emphasis on automating routine day-to-day "chores" to free up more time for producing things of value, and encouraging a high level of communication and transparency between the folks building, testing and deploying the code.

Lastly, what do you like best about Foxquilt overall?

The Foxquilt team feels like a second family. Everyone is caring and open to each other's opinions. And since we're still a small company it's easy for everyone to make a real difference. The camaraderie, the sense of accomplishment, the pride everyone takes in their work. I'd say these are the things I like best.

The view of the Toronto Harbour from our office ain't bad either!

A huge thanks to Chris for giving us a glimpse into “a day in his life” at Foxquilt! Interested in being a part of the team? Check out our open positions and submit an application today!